Ep. 255: When Burnout Is Really Default Parent Resentment

Have you ever lost it over a dishwasher?

Not like, mildly annoyed. Not a little frustrated.

Like…full-body, jaw-clenched, what-is-wrong-with-me furious.

Over a dishwasher.

Or maybe it was the socks on the floor. Again. Right next to the laundry basket. Like the basket is invisible. Like you are invisible.

Or maybe it was the text. You know the one. "Hey, where's the ___?" And you're standing in the kitchen, in the middle of six things, and they've looked for approximately four seconds before deciding the only logical solution is to ask you.

And something in you just… snaps.

Not because of the text.

Not because of the socks.

Not because of the dishwasher.

But because you are tired…and not just tired like you need a nap. Tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. Tired in a way that's been building for a long time.

Here's what I want to ask you today:

What if that anger isn't irrational?

What if it's actually a signal?

Let’s unpack it!

Resources mentioned in this conversation: 

https://www.jenniferroskamp.com/i-m-fine-decoder-jennifer

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Transcript

Okay, so here's the thing. What if you have been calling burnout the wrong thing? What if what you have been calling burnout is actually something more specific? It's something more specific with a different name and an understanding that the right name is the first step to actually doing something about it. Today, what we're gonna be talking about is default parent resentment. We're gonna be talking about what it is, why it shows up in midlife.

Honestly, like a freight train, why so many women have been quietly carrying it for years and what you can actually do about it. So, welcome to the Intentional Midlife Mom Podcast. If you're new here, I am so glad that you found this. This is where we have conversations for midlife women who are done pretending they're fine, women who are keeping things together on the outside.

And quietly exhausted on the inside. We don't do fluff here. We don't do toxic positivity. We do honest conversations, sometimes hard ones. We also talk about real tools that you can actually use in your real life. And today's topic, I'm guessing that it hits close to home for a lot of us. If you have ever felt like you are the only one tracking the entire operation of your family,

Every appointment, every deadline, every emotional need, every grocery list, every form, every birthday gift, this conversation is for you. If you've found yourself thinking, I'm just burned out, but something about that answer doesn't feel quite right or complete. This conversation very well might fill the gap. And if resentment has been quietly building in you, maybe you don't even want to say that word.

Out loud. Maybe it feels ugly. Maybe it feels like a bad mom thing to admit. But I want you to know you're in the right place because we are going to talk about this honestly today. So I want to start our time together really with a story. So several years ago, I hit a wall, and I mean a wall. Not the kind where you're tired and you push through, the kind where you look around at your life and you realize you're not just running on empty.

You're running on fumes that have been borrowed from a tank that's been running dry for a very long time. For me, I was exhausted, bone deep exhausted. And I kept telling myself it was burnout because that's the word that we use for this type of thing, right? It's the acceptable word. Burnout sounds actually clinical. It sounds like something that happens to hardworking women. It carries a certain dignity about it.

But underneath the burnout, there was something else. And for a while, I didn't want to look at it directly because the honest answer was that I was angry. Not at anything dramatic, not at some big injustice. I was angry that I was the only one who seemed to be tracking everything. I was angry that I walked through my house and I saw 10 things that needed to happen. And I was apparently the only one who could see them. I was angry that my family could walk past the same pile.

The same problem, the same unfinished thing for days. And not one of them seemed to register that it even existed. And I realized something as all of that kind of came together. I wasn't burned out from doing too much. I was burned out from being the only one who noticed. And there's a difference. And that difference has a name. The problem wasn't that life was hard. Life is always gonna have some.

element ingredients of hard in it. The problem was that I felt like the only one managing the invisible weight of our family's entire operation. And let me tell you, there was there was 10 people living at home. Actually, I think there was still 11 at this point because my oldest still lived at home. And nobody else in my family knew how heavy that load was.

And that feeling, it's not just burnout. It's what happens when you've been the default parent for years and years. The resentment, it has nowhere to go. And that dishwasher, just one day, it becomes the last straw. So let's define for our purposes here the term default parent because I want to make sure that we're talking about the same thing. The default parent is not necessarily the parent who does the most visible work.

It's not even always the stay-at-home parent. It doesn't matter whether you work full-time, part-time, or from home. The default parent is the one who never gets to stop thinking about it. That's the defining characteristic. She's the one who gets called first by school, by the kids, by the pediatrician's office, by the coach, by the teacher who needs something. She's the one who remembers everything: the dentist appointment and the permission slip and the friend's birthday and the fact that they're

Always out of the snack that that one kid will actually eat. She's the one who notices everything, the worn-out shoe before it becomes a blister, the shift in her kid's mood before it becomes a meltdown, the tension in the house before it becomes a fight. She's also the one who tracks everything, the sports schedule and the carpool rotation and the teacher conference and what gift they're bringing to the party on Saturday. She's the one solving the problems before they become problems.

And getting zero credit for it because the whole point is that nobody ever sees the problem that she prevented. Does this sound familiar? Here's what makes all of this so exhausting. It's not the individual tasks, it's the anticipation. It's the constant low hum of mental monitoring that never actually turns off. You can be sitting at dinner with your family, theoretically present, and in the back of your head, you're running calculations. We're out of milk.

She has a project due Thursday. He needs new cleats before the game. Did I respond to that email? I need to call that mom back. Your family sees someone who's sitting at the table. You're running the entire family's operating system in real time. That's the invisible part. And it's the part that wears you all the way down. So there's a phrase that's been around for a while now: mental load.

Raise your hand if you've heard this. I know I have. I know I even use this term, right? So I want to talk about it here because I don't think it gets enough honest airtime, especially in the context of mid midlife. So mental load is real. Emotional labor is real. The work of managing a family's logistics, emotional climate, relationships, schedules, and crises, that is real work. It counts.

Even though you can't put it on a resume, even though it doesn't show up anywhere visible, even though when you're doing it really well, everyone around you just kind of thinks that something that everything just kind of happens. So let me be direct, completely direct about something. Just because no one can see the work does not mean it's not real work. You are the family memory bank. You're the one who remembers that the dentist wants a follow-up in six months.

That your teenager mentioned once that they were stressed about a friendship, that your husband has a work event next Tuesday, and you need to adjust dinner plans around that. You're the family crisis prevention department. You're thinking two weeks ahead of time, three steps ahead. Not because you're living in the future, but because if you don't, things fall apart. You're the household emotional manager. You're tracking moods, smoothing tensions.

Noticing when someone is off and quietly adjusting how you show up so that you don't add to it. None of this shows up on anyone's chore chart. None of it gets a gold star. And none of it ends. That's the thing about the mental load. There's no clocking out. Even when you're resting, some part of your brain is still running the system.

I've worked with a lot of women in midlife who describe this feeling of never being fully off, never fully present even when they're technically present, never fully rested, even after a full night's sleep, and they wonder if something is wrong with them. If this is you, let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with you. You're carrying responsibilities that most people never see. Of course, you're tired.

Now, this is the part in the conversation that really kind of gets probably is gonna get under your skin a little bit because this is where I'm gonna say something that might land a little bit uncomfortably, and I want you to hear it with the full intent behind it. Sometimes we accidentally participate in the very cycle that is burning us out. Sometimes we accidentally

I know this is, I'm not even gonna bother repeating it. Let me just say, let me repeat it again. Okay. Sometimes we accidentally participate in the very cycle that's burning us out. So stick with me here. Here's how it usually goes, okay? It starts small. Your partner loads the dishwasher the wrong way, or forgets to add something to the grocery list, or handles the situation with the kids in a way that's different from how you would have done it. And you have a choice in that moment. Let it go or step in.

And most of us step in because it's faster, because we know exactly how we want it done, because redoing something feels easier than the conversation it would take to course correct. And so we say out loud or to ourselves, it's easier if I just do it. They won't do it right. It'll take longer to explain it than to just handle it, or I'll just take care of it. And in the moment that is true. It is faster. It is easier in the short term.

But here's what that pattern builds over time. Now, this is the part where we have to take a little bit of ownership here. But this is really gonna help you see so that you can make some changes. Okay. so here's the pattern. Your family learns, not because they're lazy or malicious, but because you've taught them that they don't need to track any of these things because you're tracking it. They don't need to remember it because you remember it.

They don't need to initiate because you'll you will initiate. And the cycle goes like this: you absorb more, they do less. You become resentful. You absorb even more because asking for help now feels harder than ever. So they do even less. And one day you wake up and you realize you're carrying the invisible weight of your family and you have no idea how you got here. This is not about self-blame, however. I want to say that clearly and I want you to really hear it.

This is not me telling you that your burnout is your fault. It is not. But it is me saying that awareness, honest awareness is where, again, I said this a minute ago, this is where the change can start. And honest awareness includes looking at the ways that we have accidentally trained our families to need us for everything. I've caught myself in this pattern more than once.

I've been the one who said, I'll handle it one too many times and then turned around and resented the fact that I was handling everything. That's not my family's failure. That's a system that got built without anyone fully realizing it was being built. And here's the question that's underneath all of it. The one I think that is worth it's worth sitting with. Have you become attached to being the capable one? Is part of your identity wrapped up in being?

In being the one who keeps everything running? Is there some part of you that even while it exhausts you also validates you? Now, this is not a gotcha question. This is a real honest question that I've had to ask myself. And the answer when I sat with it honestly was sometimes yes. Now that awareness didn't make me feel worse, it actually made me feel freer.

Because when you can see the pattern, you can start to change it. Now, here's something that I need you to understand. This is not a new problem for most of us. The default parent dynamic didn't start this year. For most women, it was built slowly over years, maybe even decades. So why then is it bothering us so much more now? Well, the answer is because the woman that you were at 32 is not the woman that you are at 48.

Or 45 or 52. And that matters more than we talk about. In your 30s, you had more capacity. Not because you were a different person at your core, but because your energy reserves were deeper. You could absorb more before you hit empty. You could push through more before it started to show. In midlife, that capacity shrinks.

Maybe you already know, but I'll tell you, your energy isn't what it was. Your hormones are doing their thing. Your patience for things that never deserved your patience to begin with has shortened and your priorities have quietly changed, even if you haven't fully put your finger on it and identified that yet. You're starting to ask different questions than you asked 10 years ago. You're asking questions like, why do I feel so invisible? Why am I carrying so much?

Is this really how life is supposed to feel? What would happen if I just stopped doing it? Now that last one is the one that scares women the most because we're afraid of the answer. Would anything actually fall apart or would it just keep going? And nobody would even notice any anything that you were doing. Here's the other thing that midlife does: it exposes imbalances that you have been tolerating for years.

What worked or at least felt manageable at 35 doesn't work at 48. The same load that felt heavy but doable before now feels like it's crushing you. And it's not because the load got heavier, but because you have been carrying it longer. And your body, your mind, and your spirit are finally sending a signal that says, this was never meant to be one person's job. Midlife has a way of making you honest about things you used to be able to ignore.

And that's not a crisis. It's actually an opportunity. So let's talk about the resentment itself, because I know that some of you are uncomfortable even just considering that word. Resentment feels like a bad word. It feels like something a bitter person feels. It feels like the opposite of the gracious, loving, capable woman that you're trying to be. But here's what I want to offer you today. Resentment, if you allow it, can be information.

It is not a character flaw. It's a signal. And like any signal, it is worth paying attention to. Not because it's pleasant, but because it's pointing you towards something real that you need to take a look at. How does resentment actually show up? Because it doesn't usually announce itself clearly. It shows up as irritability. You're snapping at people and you don't fully understand why. You feel like you're running hot all the time. It shows up as

Snapping over small things like the dishwasher, the socks, the text message. These things shouldn't matter that much. And yet somehow they're the thing that breaks you wide open. It shows up as emotional numbness. You stop feeling connected. You stop feeling as warm, as engaged as you used to. You're going through the motions. You feel flat in spaces where you used to feel full. It shows up as withdrawal.

You pull back from conversations, from intimacy, from engagement with your own life, not because you don't care, because caring has become so exhausting that some part of you has to protect itself. It shows up as loneliness. One of the most painful parts of being the default parent is how isolating it is. You're surrounded by your family and you feel completely alone because you're carrying something invisible that nobody else fully sees.

And sometimes, if we're being really honest, it shows up as fantasies of escape, not real escape, not actually leaving, just the quiet daydream of what it would feel like just not to be responsible for anyone but yourself for an entire day. If any of these things resonate, then that is not you being a bad mom. That is your nervous system telling you that something needs to change. And so here's the reframe I want to leave you with.

Resentment is what happens when a boundary has been crossed too many times and too quietly. You didn't set out to be resentful. You set out to be helpful, to keep things running, to take care of your people. And somewhere in the process of doing all of that, something in you got overridden again and again and again until finally it started pushing back. Caring about everything does not mean carrying.

Everything. Now, this is the piece I really want you to take with you. Caring about everything does not mean carrying everything. Caring about your family is not the problem. The problem is that caring got tangled up with carrying, and nobody, including you, noticed until the resentment started showing up. Now, before we get to the practical piece, I want to slow down here for just a second. I I do this.

In almost every conversation here, because I believe deeply that awareness is not optional. You can have all of the strategies in the world. And if you haven't done the honest inner work done first, nothing sticks. So I want you to actually sit with these questions, not just listen to them. If you're driving, then hit hit pause and come back to these later. If you have two minutes tonight, write them down. Let them work on you, revisit them.

Here are the questions. What am I carrying that no one sees? Not the tasks on the to-do list, the invisible things, the tracking, the anticipating, the emotional monitoring. Name them. Second question. What responsibilities have I quietly absorbed that were never actually assigned to me? Not the ones you agreed to, the ones you just started doing and then kept doing until they became yours by default.

Third question, where have I become the automatic manager? Where does your family operate on the assumption that you will just handle it without ever having a conversation about it? I can say this is the question that really hit home when I was thinking about this with my family, when I was having all of these discoveries without realizing I was having all these discoveries years ago. I felt like I was the the constant automatic manager.

The next question, what am I afraid would happen if I stepped back? Now, be honest with this question. Is the fear that things would fall apart or is part of the fear that they wouldn't? And then you'd have to reckon with how much you've been overfunctioning. Maybe there are so many things that you are doing that your family is going to be just fine when you stop doing them.

But anyway, the last question is: what would need to change for you to feel like a partner in this life instead of a manager of it? What would it feel like to come alongside your husband, to come alongside your kids in their lives? What would that look like? The last question really is worth thinking about. Okay, so because we just

Aren't gonna get anywhere if all we have is the awareness piece. We also have to talk about some action. Awareness without action just keeps you stuck with really good language to describe your stuckness. So, with that in mind, here's your one practical step for this week. I'm calling it the invisible labor audit. Now, here's how it works: grab a piece of paper, not your phone, but an actual piece of paper and make a list. Write down everything that you manage, everything that you remember.

Everything that you initiate, everything that you follow up on. And I mean list everything. Doctor appointments, dentist appointments, scheduling, canceling, rescheduling, the fact that one kid needs new shoes, the birthday card that needs to go out, the thank you note from two weeks ago that's still sitting on the counter, the emotional check-in you've been meaning to have with your teenager, the dry cleaning, the parent-teacher conference, the grocery list in your head, the dinner plan for a night three days from now. Write it all down. Take as long as you need.

Most women are surprised and probably a little bit disturbed by how long that list actually is when they put it all down on paper. When it's in your head, it's it's hard to quantify it. You just can't see it. But when it's on paper, it's undeniable. Now here's the second part look at your list and ask yourself two questions. Which of these responsibilities were actually assigned to me? Either within it within an explicit conversation.

or by mutual agreement. And which ones did I quietly absorb? There's a difference. And when you can see that difference clearly, you can start to make different choices. Now the challenge for this week, and I want you to actually pick one, not theorize about all of them is this. Choose one of those areas to stop automatically owning. Just one. It could be school communication, it could be the family calendar. It could be meal planning.

Or kids' logistics or the emotional follow-up that always falls on you. It could be managing what everyone is out of in the kitchen. Just choose one area. Tell whoever needs to know. And then here's the hard part. Actually let it go. Don't circle back. Actually let it go. This is so important. This is not a small thing.

Don't circle back. Don't rescue it. Don't do it anyway because it's faster or because you can't stand watching it to not get done at the speed or standard that you do it. Just let it go. For women who have been the default parent for years, releasing ownership of even one area feels enormous. It might feel irresponsible. It might trigger guilt. Just let it. Because that discomfort is the beginning of a different life.


So here are some takeaways. I've got four of them for you. Number one, the default parent isn't the one who does the most necessarily. She's the one who never gets to stop thinking about it, no matter what it is. If you've been carrying the invisible operating system of your family for years, what you're feeling isn't a failure of any kind. It's the accumulated weight of unseen work. Takeaway number two resentment is information, not a character flaw.

When it shows up as irritability or numbness or snapping over small things, it's signaling that a boundary has been crossed too many times and too quietly. Get curious about it instead of judging yourself for it. Takeaway number three: we often participate in the default parent cycle without realizing it. Every time we say to ourselves or out loud, it's just easier if I do it. We reinforce the system. Awareness of that pattern.

Without shame is what makes a different choice possible. And finally, do the invisible labor audit this week. Write down everything that you manage on paper, right? Remember and initiate, right? Then ask which of it was assigned explicitly to you versus just something that you quietly absorbed. And then choose one area to stop automatically owning and then let it go.

So maybe you're burned out. Maybe that word has been your whole explanation for how you're feeling and it's not wrong. But maybe underneath the burnout, there is something more specific. Something with more texture and more honesty and more information in it. Maybe you're carrying the responsibilities that were never meant to belong to one person. And maybe the resentment that you've been feeling, and possibly judging yourself for feeling, is not a sign that something is wrong with you.

Maybe it's a sign that something needs to change because the truth is you can love your family fiercely without carrying your family entirely. You can be a devoted mom and a present partner and a generous woman and still say this load needs to be shared. You can serve your people without disappearing inside your responsibilities. That's not selfish, that's wisdom.


And if resentment has been showing up in your house, maybe for a while, in the snap over the dishwasher or the exhaustion that you know sleep isn't fixing, in the loneliness that doesn't make sense, so it's just there, get curious because resentment might be the clearest signal that you've had in a while. And it's pointing directly toward the change that's needed next. You don't have to keep carrying what was never meant to be yours alone. So

If this conversation resonated with you, I want you to do two things. First, share it. Forward it to a friend who needs to hear it. Text the woman in your life who you can tell is running on empty. Sometimes the most powerful thing that we can do for each other is say, I heard this and thought of you. Second, do the audit. Actually do it this week, not someday, this week. It takes 20 minutes and it will show you something you cannot unsee.

Write down the invisible load, look at what you've absorbed, and choose one thing to release. That is where change begins. Not in a big dramatic overhaul, but in one honest look at what you've been carrying and one brave decision to put something down. Now, if you're wondering a little bit, if you're looking for a little bit of added help, I've created what I call the I'm fine decoder. We'll link it down in the notes with this.

conversation here. It's a free download. It will help you, again, diagnose. Are you actually fine? It's a great tool. And I want to make sure that you grab it. So head to the head to the notes with this episode and grab it there. It's called the I'm fine decoder and women love it, especially midlife women. All right, well that's what I had for you today, friend. Until we talk again, lead yourself well.